Shared Collections - Unassigning from Collection and Assigning Back to Original Owner

I may be confused how to do this…. I am a family subscriber and maintain two accounts for myself: one personal and one that stores work-related passwords.

I wanted to unassign a password from a collection (shared passwords between my personal and work user accounts) and assign it back to the original user (my work user account).

How do I do this? When I unselect the collection name, I get a warning when I try to save it. It looks like you can’t unassign a vault entry from a collection once it’s assigned.

I think this describes it: https://bitwarden.com/help/sharing/#reclaimed-shared-item-ownership

Thanks for posting this.

For some reason, I can clone it to my personal username/account but not to my work one that created the password. (The work account is actually one of my personal accounts in my family plan.)

I verified that the work account is set to manage the shared passwords collection.

Did you do that “as” your work account? Because I would think only when you were operating as your work account, you would be able to “move” (clone) an item into your work account’s personal vault.

Yes. I tried both ways. I can assign it to my personal account (from either work or personal), but assigning it to my work account is not an option that’s shown.

Hm. I just tried to reproduce that – and I couldn’t.

In my case it’s only a free (test) organization, but…

  • when I’m logged in with BW account A, then I can clone an item from Collection 1 into account A’s personal vault
  • when I’m logged in with account B, then I can also clone that same item from Collection 1 into account B’s personal vault

Account A is my free test BW account, which is the Owner of the free org.
Account B is my personal premium BW account, which is an Admin for that free org, and has manage permission for Collection 1.

@southerndoc Only a speculation, and maybe irrelevant here, but: is your work account only a “User” in that organization – or an “Admin” or “Owner”? (hmm… though, I just tested it with account B as “User”, and it still works, so the member role should be irrelevant)

Hm, that also differs from what I see. In the cloning process, I can only ever choose between the Organization as the owner (which it is before cloning) and the personal vault of the BW account I’m currently operating on.

I can neither add clone the item into account A’s personal vault when I’m logged in as account B – nor can I clone the item into account B’s personal vault when I’m logged in as account A.

(PS: I used the current browser extension 2026.1.0 for my tests)

Oh wow. I never thought to use the browser extension. It allows me to select the work account with it. I was trying to do it from the Bitwarden website. I guess I just found a bug with their website.

Is your Family plan one you’ve obtained from your employer?

No, it’s mine. Also, when I say “work” account, it’s not an employer account. It’s a separate work account under my personal/family plan (I use a separate email address for work related things and have a separate Chrome profile for it – therefore, I have a separate Bitwarden account for my work-related things).

I’m in contact with support. They’ve asked for some additional information that I plan to send when I get home tonight.

Turns out this was a great case of user error. I had a passkey set up for my personal account. I thought I had one set up for my work account as well. When I was logging in with a passkey, it was logging in as my personal account. I never noticed it. After logging in with the master password, I was able to successfully clone it to my work account.

Now to see if I can get a passkey for the work account and one for the personal account stored in Apple Passwords.

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